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The Third Magnetism. Physicists Confirm a Type That 'Shouldn't Exist'
For nearly a hundred years, physicists divided magnetic materials into two classes. On November 4, 2026, a SLAC team published experimental proof of a third, altermagnetism.
Imagine studying water your whole life and discovering that ice has three phases, not two, and that you simply lacked the instruments to see the third. Something roughly equivalent just happened with magnetism. On November 4, 2026, a team at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory published a paper in Science titled “Chiral altermagnon in MnTe.” It contains experimental proof of altermagnetism: a third class of magnetism that theorists first predicted in 2022, and which the physics community spent four years unable to confirm or rule out.